News Desk Report
President John Dramani Mahama, has given indication of his belief in the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC) credentials, saying he is a left-of-center politician and still a socialist.
President Mahama disclosed this in an interview published in the September, 2012 edition of the Africawatch magazine.
“I believe in social-protection programs. I believe also that we must distribute fairly the fruits of economic growth to all classes of our society”, president Mahama told the pan-African magazine.
As a social democrat who believes in an equitable distribution of fruits of the economy, President John Mahama, made it known that the market alone does not truly reflects the class relationship; and that he will distribute the fruits of growth fairly.
“And so the state must involve itself in terms of ensuring that we don’t leave the poor and vulnerable segments of society behind. People believe that if you just leave the creative forces of the entrepreneur class, it would create development, and that development would benefit everybody else. I don’t believe that. So in that sense you can all call me a socialist”, he indicated.
“What I lost was my dogmatic belief in an ideology. I believe that every country faces its peculiar circumstances and challenges, and you cannot take the fix of one society and impose it on another society”, the president expressed.
“Unfortunately, as young Marxists, what we were doing was looking at what had happened in the Soviet Union, and believing that there was going to be a peasant and worker revolt in all our individual countries. That is the dogma I lost”, he unequivocally told the Africawatch Magazine in his interview.
According to him, even though he is a leftist, ‘and you call me a social democrat or a socialist’, for him what he believes in, is that there must be social justice and the fruits of growth must equitably be shared.
He stated however that, the only way to achieve his much espoused equitable distribution of economic growth is through some state interventions.
“So if that is socialist, so be it. But I lost the dogmatic ideological thinking that I had before”, president Mahama further stated.